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Life's too big, I'm not: Pluto and other Dwarf Planets Wiki
What is a Dwarf Planet? A dwarf planet is a celestial body that looks like a planet, but it lacks specific features necessary to be considered as a planet. Therefore, astronomers created a new category to classify these unusual bodies. For example: 1. 1. They are relatively small. (Preferably half the size of mercury and smaller.) 2. Their orbit is tilted compared to the other planets. 3. Their orbits can go through another planet’s/dwarf planet’s orbit. 4. They have other objects that interfere in their orbit besides them. Dwarf planets have different names depending on their placement in the solar system. If the object travels beyond Neptune it is known as a trans Neptunian object (TNO). But there are different names for TNOs. For example Pluto and Eris are known as plutoids or ice dwarfs. Some other names are Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), Scattered Disk Objects (SDOs) and Oort Cloud Objects (OCOs). All in all there are thousands of unknown dwarf planets just in our the solar system. TNOs are all located in the Kuiper Belt, the Scattered Disk and the Oort Cloud. This is thought to be a vast sphere around the sun containing all sorts of different things. The only exeption is Ceres. Ceres is located between mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.~L Pluto Pluto is one sixth the size of the moon and around 0.06% the volume of Earth. Pluto's axis is nearly 120 degrees and has the highest eccentricity of any other planetary orbit, even at its great distance from the sun. There are far greater changes in atmospheric pressures than that even of Mars. It is possible though that the thin atmosphere of Pluto can entirely freeze and fall as snow, as it moves farther and farther away from the sun. Due to the angle of its axis, it does have seasons which are very extreme. When it has a solstice, one quarter of the dwarf planet is continuous daylight while the other half is in constant darkness. It is always extremely cold, considering its distance away from the sun. Its surface temperature is -230 degree Celsius.~L Pluto's history Pluto was discovered as a theory by a man called Percival Lowell in 1900. He thought that there was a ninth planet to the eight planets in the solar system at that time. He called that planet “Planet X”. Unfortunately, in 1916, Percival died without discovering “Planet X”. In the late 1920s, a man called Clyde Tombaugh (pronounced TOM-bah) decided to keep searching about “Planet X”. So, he took pictures of the night sky, every night. In 1930, he noticed that a small star was moving each night to a different place each. Mr. Tombaugh knew that was a planet because planets appear to move among stars. That was “Planet X”. On the same year, on March 13 astronomers gathered to find a name for the “Planet X”. An 11 year old girl called Venetia Burney thought that Pluto was a great name for “Planet X”. Because Pluto was the name of the roman god of the underworld and also the first 2 letters of Pluto is P and L, which are the initials of Percival Lowell, the first man who had the theory that Pluto existed. ~A Differences Between Pluto and Earth Pluto’s surface is completely frozen due to its distance from the sun and its hot core so small or may be frozen by now. Pluto’s atmosphere barely exists, while earth has such a thick and large atmosphere. Earth’s orbit is nearly circular while Pluto has an eccentric shape and the angle that Pluto’s orbit is on is on a very large tilt compared to earth. The orbit also interferes with Neptune’s orbit and earth’s orbit does not interfere with any other planet’s orbit. Pluto is not active like earth and might not even have an active core.~L Pluto's Satellites Pluto has 5 satellites that orbit it. These are natural satellites (moons), but some say that they were meteoroids that got trapped in Plutos gravity. There is also a manmade satellite (called New Horizons) that was launched in January 2006 and will reach Pluto in 2015. Pluto’s five natural satellites are: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.~L Why is Pluto not a planet anymore? Pluto is not a planet anymore because when the astronomers found Ceres which was classified as a dwarf planet, they realized that Ceres was larger than Pluto, so the astronomers began to think if Pluto qualified as a planet. So Pluto "took" a test to see if it was a planet. the 3 rules of being a planet are: it has to have an orbit around the sun, it has to have a spherical shape, and the planets gravity must be able to pull small objects towards it , or sling them away. Pluto could not do the last point, so it was classified as a dwarf planet. ~ A Charon Charon is the largest moon of Pluto. It was discovered by a man called James Christy in 1978, who was looking at Pluto from a telescope, where he noticed that that there was a bulge from Pluto. Mr. Christy thought that the bulge was a moon, so he began to do some calculations about where and when the bulge would appear. Mr. Christy was convinced that Pluto had a moon after he noticed that the bulge moved around Pluto. he now wanted to find a name for the moon. Mr. Christy wanted to name the moon after his wife, Charlene, and they both came up with the name Charon. then, Mr. Christy realized that planets had to be named after a type of mythology. somebody suggested Persephone, who was the wife of Pluto. when Mr. Christy looked the name Persephone up, he saw there was a name called Charon, who was the boatman who rowed souls to the underworld! he named the moon Charon so he could name the moon after his wife and he could still name the moon after a kind of mythology.~A Eris Eris is the farthest and largest dwarf planet from the sun and the largest dwarf planet at the present. Eris is larger than Pluto by 28% percent. It was found in 2003 by M.E. Brown C.A. Trujillo & D.L. Rabinowitz. It was named after the Greek goddess of strife, discord, and conflict. The name was found one and a half years after it was discovered. It is about half the size of mercury. The colour of Eris looks grey because the methane on it is frozen not allowing us to be able to see the different colours behind it. Eris will come within 35 AU to the sun but that’s going to happen in over 2 centuries. Eris also has an oval orbit like Pluto. Eris takes around 557 earth years to complete one orbit. Eris was discovered in 2003 by an American team but no one could classify it till 2005. Eris has one moon called Dysnomia. Eris and it’s moon are both about -243 degrees Celsius. That is so cold that you would turn into and ice block in a matter of seconds. Eris’s orbit is so tilted its almost at a 90 degree angle.~B Makemake It is the second farthest dwarf planet from the sun. It doesn’t have any moons. Its diameter is a third smaller than Pluto. It was discovered in march 31st 2005 by Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo & David Rabinowitz. It is usually -239 degrees Celsius regularly. It is named after a god of Rapa Nui, who were the people of the eastern island. He was the god of fertility and the creator of humans in Rapa Nui mythology. ~A Ceres Ceres is the closest dwarf planet to the sun. It is also the smallest dwarf planet known. It was considered as a asteroid becuase of its small size.Ceres is normally -105 degrees celsius. Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered and named Ceres in early 1801. It was named after the roman god of harvest, Ceres.~A Sedna Sedna is the 5th largest dwarf planet. It is thought to be a little smaller than 1,800 km across. It is recently reaching it’s closest point to the sun at 90AU and after year 2075 Sedna will go back into space to complete another orbit. It is slightly closer to us than Eris at the moment. The reason Sedna looks reddish brown is because the sun has heated the icy methane on it and now, it has become a muddy material called tholin. Some scientists say that Sedna belongs to the Oort cloud with the longest orbit known at the moment. Its orbit takes around 10, 000 earth years. Some say that Sedna may have been nudged from it’s lonely path through the Oort cloud by another star. One day on Sedna lasts about 10 hours. The tholin in Sedna makes it the reddest planet in the solar system apart from Mars. The sun is so small from Sedna that if you hold a pin at arm’s length on Sedna, the sun would fit on the head of the pin.~L Haumea Haumea is one third the size of Pluto. It was discovered in 2004 by a team lead by Mike Brown of Caltech at the Palomar Observatory in the United States, and also by a team that was lead by J.L. Ortiz at the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Spain. On September 17, 2008 it was recognized as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union. It was named after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth. Haumea is not spherical like all the other dwarf planets, it has more of an eliptical shape due to it’s rapid rotation.~L Glossary Eccentricity: The measurement of how circular is a planet’s orbit. Celestial Body: Dwarf planets that are visible in the sky. Atmosphere: An envelope of gases surrounding a planet. Orbit: A curved path of a celestial object circling around a star planet or moon. Kuiper Belt: A reigon in the solar system that lies beyond Neptune's orbit. Scattered Disk: A distant reogon of the Solar System sparcely populated by ice dwarfs. Oort Cloud: A huge collection of comets , orbiting the sun far beyond the orbit of pluto. Axis: An imaginary line that a body rotates on. Astronomer: A person who studies or is an expert at astronomy. Telescope: A tool used to view objects in space. Diameter: A straight line that passes through the middle of a body. Methane: A gas with no colour or odour that is the main constituent of natural gas. Solstice: The 2 times of the year when the sun reaches it's highest or lowest point.~L 1 AU : a 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers Category:Browse